Analysis: Obama eats his peas

If President Obama didn't look especially happy for most of today's speech in Ohio (he scowled through a half-dozen applause lines), it was because he probably wasn't.

The runaway narrative of Thursday will pit Obama's long, explanatory, mostly grim Cleveland speech in the afternoon vs. Mitt Romney's brisker, more animated delivery a few minutes earlier in Cincinnati. And the Buckeye Brawl angle is legit -- in fact, it's the way both campaigns view it.

But the obvious storyline misses a bigger point. The dueling speeches weren't dueling at all. They were more like two rings of a circus, two performers with differing imperatives, moving in opposite directions, executing different routines -- each safe in the big city friendliest to them.

Romney's task was to roll up his sleeves (He took it literally: No sports coat today) and prove that he could sound a little more Home Depot than Thurston Howell III when talking kitchen table economics. It worked, at least for a day. Plus he wanted to upstage Obama's solo act, a classier version of the prep-school election trick of his staffers' heckling David Axelrod in Boston and shadowing of Joe Biden on the road.

Obama's speech was a shaggier, more of a work in progress and far more serious (He wore a POTUS suit and stood in front of flags), as befits a man who has to figure out how to sell a second term in the midst of another mid-summer economic swoon. Analysts, like Jonathan Alter on MSNBC, complained that it was too long at 54 minutes and missed the mark thematically.

But Obama needs an effective argument, not a memorable speech. The days of his ability to game-change with a single utterance, however masterfully delivered, are over. His campaign recognizes that however fun the Bain interlude was -- and Chicago throughly enjoyed it for a while -- Obama must now build a coherent rationale for his incumbency that addresses voters' doubts.

And that's what Chicago and the West Wing are trying to do, with the first step being Thursday's imperfect but important speech. To paraphrase Grant, they say they intend to fight on this line until November. But will they?

Follow-through, not flash, is at premium in 2012. In the past, Obama has proven expert at the latter, indifferent to the former.